Obama reverses to release abuse photos

MARGARET TALEV and JONATHAN S. LANDAYMcClatchy Newspapers

Published Thursday, May 14, 2009

WASHINGTON--In an about-face, President Barack Obama is seeking to withhold photos of past abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing their release could endanger soldiers abroad and threaten national security an assertion his lawyers failed to make in court only weeks ago.

Obama's shift, announced Wednesday, drew swift condemnation from the American Civil Liberties Union, whose 2004 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush administration's Department of Defense led a federal court in New York to order the photos released. A federal appeals court upheld the decision in September, and refused to rehear the case March 11.

The Obama administration had agreed earlier to release at least 44 photos by May 28. The administration now has until June 9 either to reargue the case before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, or petition the U.S. Supreme Court.

Obama made a brief statement on his decision late Wednesday afternoon. He said he had concluded the photos wouldn't add useful knowledge about detainee abuse, but would "further inflame anti-American opinion and . . . put our troops in greater danger."

He emphasized the Pentagon has investigated the incidents and applied sanctions where appropriate. He also stressed he has made it clear that abuse of detainees is prohibited and "will not be tolerated."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said "as commander in chief" Obama was obliged to ask his legal team to make a new argument for withholding the pictures for the sake of national security.

"The argument that the president has asked his legal team to make is not an argument that the previous legal team made in that case," Gibbs said.

The shift comes amid a fierce debate over U.S. detainee policy.

Obama has called for closing the detainee prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is under pressure to endorse a full-blown public accounting of Bush-era interrogation techniques widely denounced as torture.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, has been leading a defense of the Bush administration's practices, and accuses Obama of undermining the nation's security by shutting Guantanamo and releasing Bush-era legal memos on interrogation techniques.

The issue comes at a crucial juncture for U.S. policy toward the Muslim world, with the Obama administration pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq in order to boost U.S. forces who are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, confronting the growing al-Qaida-backed Islamic insurgency in nuclear-armed Pakistan, struggling to revive moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and working to forge an international front against Iran's nuclear program.

The request for what's effectively a legal do-over is an unlikely step for a president who is trained as a constitutional lawyer, advocated greater government transparency and ran for election as a critic of his predecessor's secretive approach toward the handling of terrorism detainees.

Eric Glitzenstein, a lawyer with expertise in Freedom of Information Act requests, said he thought Obama faced an uphill legal battle. "They should not be able to go back time and again and concoct new rationales" for withholding what have been deemed public records, he said.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero accused the Obama administration of adopting "the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration." He said "when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration's complicity in covering them up."

Military Families United, an advocacy organization, released a statement praising Obama's decision:

"The president today chose to put the safety of our troops before the demands of an activist agenda. These photographs serve no purpose other than to embolden the enemy with propaganda to use in their recruitment of future jihadists, hinder our mission in Iraq and Afghanistan and risk the lives of our troops."

Several lawmakers, mostly Republicans, who have objected to more public airing of details of harsh detainee interrogations, applauded the president. They said no good would come from releasing the photos and worried they would further inflame anti-U.S. anger among Muslims.

Democrats in Congress were curiously silent. Neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California nor Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, two of the most outspoken advocates of further investigation into allegations of detainee abuses, issued initial reactions.

Ex-FBI says harsh interrogations don't work

WASHINGTON (AP)--A former FBI interrogator who questioned al-Qaida prisoners testified Wednesday that the Bush administration falsely boasted of success from extreme techniques like waterboarding, when those methods were slow, unreliable and made an important witness stop talking.

Soufan said his team had to step aside when CIA contractors took over. They began using harsh methods that caused Zubaydah to "shut down," Soufan said, and his team had to be recalled the get the prisoner talking again.

Soufan appeared before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding the first hearing on extreme interrogation methods since the Obama administration last month released Bush administration legal opinions authorizing them.

Memos by the Bush Justice Department contended that waterboarding a form of simulated drowning as well as sleep deprivation and other extreme techniques were legal under U.S. and international law, but Democrats said they amounted to torture.

President Barack Obama has said he wanted to avoid partisan hearings over the interrogations, but the hearing turned partisan in its opening seconds.

Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., promised at the outset to unravel "our country's descent into torture" and vowed to expose "a bodyguard of lies" by the Bush administration.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked whether "we would have this hearing if we were attacked this afternoon."

Graham called the hearing a "political stunt" and said Democrats were trying to judge officials who soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks "woke up one morning like most Americans and said, 'Oh, my God, what's coming next?"'

He also joined in the frequent Republican criticism that members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the interrogation program and raised no protest at the time.

Graham appeared irate, commenting at one point, "The people we're prosecuting didn't rob a liquor store."

He said former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested there was valuable information obtained from the extreme methods. "I would like the committee to get that information. Let's get both sides of the story here," Graham said.

Soufan countered that his personal experience showed that the harsh interrogation techniques didn't work even when there wasn't a lot of time to prevent an attack.

"Waiting 180 hours as part of the sleep deprivation stage is time we cannot afford to wait in a ticking bomb scenario," he said.

Soufan said the harsh techniques were "ineffective, slow and unreliable and, as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida."

Soufan testified that "many of the claims made" by the Bush administration were inaccurate or half-truths.